ANNOUNCEMENTS
Malaria is one of the biggest health risks in the world. Approximately 86% of malaria deaths in the world occur in children under the age of 5(World Malaria Report, 2011). 3.2 billion people are at the risk of contracting malaria and in India that figure stands at 1.2 billion people, which is 94% of the country’s total population. 435000 malarial deaths were recorded in the year 2017. According to World Health Organization 86.5% of total malaria deaths occur in children.
In recent years, efforts have been made to study the spread of the disease using geospatial techniques. There have been several studies that tried to map out the Spatio temporal patterns of the disease at various scales, however there are limited studies that explored the Spatio-temporal pattern of the disease and tried to understand the factors causing its transmission. The epidemiological maps that have been produced using modelling techniques aim at predicting and assessing the risk in the affected regions and isolating contributing factors. However, estimating the risk of a disease is more complicated than it may seem and the reason being that there is often variations at a local scale, which is not easily accounted for by known variables. Here, an attempt has been made to analyse and assess the status of Malaria disease in children below the age of 5, at district level, in states which has shown an increase in the number of cases in the past decade. Hot spot analysis and spatial regression models were used to identify the accountable variables.
